by Sue Woolfe
I turned over to sleep again. In the morning, there was no sound except the wind skidding a plastic bucket across the verandah, and under that, a curious swishing sound. I lifted a slat of the Venetian blinds and looked out. In front of me was a street of red dust, lined with identical suburban houses with walls dreary with smears and handprints. The houses were all dilapidated, with rusting gutters that often lurched down the walls, and broken windows boarded up with cardboard, and front doors with grubby remnants of paint, most of which had peeled off. Some houses had been painted with different colours, here scarlet, here pink, here lemon-yellow, but in their fading hues that early enthusiasm now seemed like pathos. Everywhere were gates rusted off their hinges, some lying on the ground, and rusting metal gate posts joined to wire-netting fences, sometimes slumped under a vine I could only assume was growing wild, since there were no flowers or lawns or vegetables or hanging plants or anything that would suggest cultivation. These people were not farmers, they were nomads, I reminded myself, still with their travelling embedded in their language, yet they’d been contained in this village as if they were poverty-stricken suburban whites. Torn paper and plastic rubbish had blown everywhere, on the roads, on the verges, but ending up against the fences and caught captive there, like children imprisoned inside a playpen and trying to break out of it, as if the very rubbish was willing itself to push through the spaces made by the wire netting so it could escape out into the desert beyond. In the front yards were broken-down cars propped up on blocks, and scattered plastic toys no longer glowing with shop-bought colours but tired and scratched, becoming the colour of the dust itself, and old flour tins hoisting timber boards that seemed to serve as tables. Often there’d be a bedraggled sofa with faded torn fabric and broken springs bulging underneath. Every front yard had an open fire, some still smoking, ringed around by blackened stones. But there was no one around. Breakfast had been cooked and eaten, and the families had disappeared. Even the leaves of the tree outside my window hung listlessly, moving backwards and forwards like shuffling feet. My eye searched for freshness, newness, but there was none. At that moment, as if the irony had been timed just for me, a muttering TV set in a scruffy front yard flashed to a shot of a cream-suited, cravated, handsome, beaming reporter with blond blow-dried hair holding a microphone to his mouth like a rock singer as he marvelled at the glowing splendour of a Hollywood film-star’s mansion.
I fell back on the bed, and lay with my hand over my eyes. I groaned at my foolishness. Till that moment I’d only thought of two things: finding the Ian of my childhood, and heroically rescuing E.E. Albert’s reputation, tarnished by championing me, so I would become once more an interesting person in her estimation. For a moment I let myself pretend that there was a town over the distant almost-hills I’d glimpsed last night – with rows of bright shops and cafés and piped music and theatres and bars and hotels – all of which, as we drove out of Alice Springs, I’d left cheerfully behind.
The trouble was, I’d given little thought to the mechanics of finding the old lady, let alone getting her trust and recording her song, and I hadn’t for a single moment considered what it might be like to spend a month here in this desolate, decrepit mimicry of a white suburb, hundreds of bumpy kilometres from a white town.
I must’ve lain there for half an hour, half-asleep in despair. I was roused by a shout from the street, and prised apart a slat of the dusty Venetian blinds again. A few bare-footed black children pushed a stroller, laughing and shouting. I made myself copy the shouting but in a whisper. Though the stroller was heading away from me, I could see the long black legs of a teenager sticking like scissors out one side. So that was what the laughter had been about. Even the shouts sounded dusty.
I had to get up. The sooner I found the old lady and recorded her, the sooner I could leave. I made a timetable: I could surely do that within a day and then somehow beg a ride back to Alice Springs in the first car going, however rusted it was.
As I passed the washing machine, it switched its cycle – so that was the swishing sound – and I peeked in. There was a lone blue linen shirt swirling in a vast tub full of water, like a dead fish.
I went back to my room and dressed. Adrian had put in a hanging rack and many hangers. I dithered but in the end I unpacked only three skirts, and then stopped. My work would be over soon. I might not even need to stay the night.
I reminded myself: one step at a time. First, have breakfast. I’d get nowhere sitting in the house worrying. Go out to somewhere busy, I said to myself, and look for an old, sick woman.
It came to me that E.E. Albert might be impressed if I recorded more than the ancient song, if I recorded the language as it was currently spoken, to compare it to the song.
Such an interesting mind, she’d say. Even the thought of that made me flush with a warm glow.
I took out my recorder and put in a new battery, and then I remembered the photos in my workbag that had almost given me away, and I hid them under my mattress.
In the kitchen I boiled the kettle and riffled through my food box, which Daniel or Adrian must have brought in from the troopie, and made tea, my favourite tea, Earl Grey, and sat at the kitchen bench, like a woman alone in her house in an ordinary suburb. The familiarity of these rituals comforted me. One step at a time. I looked in my box and decided to keep everything inside it, rather than finding storage places. Now I’d accomplished getting here, I could see the most time-consuming job was over. I poured out my cereal, pulled the plug on my UHT milk, and ate, getting more confident by the minute. Next to me was a cardboard box, and on top of many papers was a faxed letter, signed with ornate swirls.
I remembered when Ian spent hours practising a signature that hid his name, to make himself seem enigmatic. I could only sign in my ordinary stilted handwriting, always with at least one letter crossed out, always with a blotch of ink, no matter how hard I concentrated.
‘You write like you want to look obedient,’ he’d say. Even then, he’d been a rebel and I’d been an appeaser.
I leaned over to read the faxed letter, its terseness palpable: Thank you for your comments re the second doctor, which again contradict mine. By the way, practitioner is spelt with a second ‘t’, not an ‘s’. It takes but a few seconds to check one’s spelling, and would be a courtesy. My advice to the Board remains unchanged.
I wondered if he had other enemies, besides hotheads.
Gloomily, I picked up a framed photo of the local children at a sports carnival, laughing and jubilantly holding their fingers in a victory sign. Their optimism seeped into me. Desert schools, I’d heard, were always in need of helpers. I’d go to the school and offer to help out in the classroom, and befriend the children. Schools often have photos pinned up of families, of grandmothers and great-grandmothers. I’d find a way to point out the pictures and ask them about their grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. ‘Who has a great-grandmother who sings the “Poor Thing” song?’ I’d ask.
I thought: I’ll keep a journal, to show E.E. Albert how focused I’ve been.
Someone had thrown down several biros amongst the mess on the ironing board. I reached for one and opened my notebook. I’d begin with the date – even, given how short a time I’d stay here, the hour. But on the first digit, the biro spurted a last drop of blue ink and dried up. I picked out another biro from the pile. It’d dried up too, and so had the next one, and the next one. I went back to my room and found my own biro in my workbag, and determinedly returned to the journal, but my pen had dried up as well. I wrote the date over and over, and my intention for the present moment, though afterwards there was just a crankily ploughed furrow in the page.
Day 1: Today the children will lead me to the singer.
It was as if I hadn’t written it. Only the full-stop after ‘singer’ was visible.
It was almost ten o’clock, way past school starting time. So I gave up on the journal, grabbed my recorder and my hat and shut the door behind me. The heat had an insati
able feel. I worried briefly that I must be careful not to offend Adrian, who would probably say I should wait for him to introduce me to the settlement, but he’d appreciate the urgency, anyone would. No one who didn’t belong here should be expected to live here.
No one seemed to be on the streets, though I passed some toddlers playing under a bedsheet, and I comforted myself that they were for all the world like white children playing at cubby houses. I walked past the derelict houses I’d seen through my window, and stepped over a rubble of corrugated iron and posts lying in what had been once a front yard, and wondered if local people just ripped down houses out of bad temper, or drunken boredom, perhaps. I thought that I’d do the same after a while in this heat and squalor, especially without a café or a job to escape to for a while. I saw ahead a crowd of women sitting in a circle in the shade in their yard, with children lolling against them, and other men and women, shabbily but colourfully dressed in crumpled, dusty op shop remnants, standing at the darkened doorway of a small, surely one-room corrugated hut in such a familiar way that I decided it was the home of everyone in the yard. Their poverty was so stark that I suddenly felt shame, that I shouldn’t be there, that I had no right to be there, only the right of a scholar to investigate the world – but does a scholar have that right everywhere? And anyway, I was hardly a scholar. I thought of calling out to them – in English? Would they speak English? What would I say? Ask for the old lady? Of course I couldn’t. Apologise? And for what?
But then I heard wild barking, and wheeled around to discover a rabble of dogs roaring towards me – probably the pack of last night – circling me; snarling, barking, half-starved, sick dogs without any fur, pink dogs with their ribs jutting out from their sides. A terrier, hungrier and madder than the rest, jumped on top of the others and rode them like a circus dog on horses prancing around a ring – so with it on top, they were a growling, shaking pyramid. I screamed for help. The women in the yard crowded at their fence and yelled, but the dogs ignored them.
‘Just stick your arms high up and the dogs will think you’re tall,’ a voice shouted behind me.
There was a man, a white man, running towards me, one of my kind, a chestnut waist-length pony tail bumping behind him. He yelled at the dogs with both arms above his head, a notebook flapping as he ran. Everything about him was menacing.
‘Get lost, you mangy bastards!’ he roared. The dogs faltered, their eyes flicked to him, back to me: they were unconvinced. One of them leaped at him vengefully and I stepped back. The man lunged at it with the full length of his body, notebook flapping wildly, and suddenly the top circus-dog terrier was convinced, leaped off the backs of the others and ran away, almost sideways like a crab, and then the others ran away too, knocking over the littlest one, a black-haired puppy, so it had to right itself, rolling and finding its feet before it raced after the others, yelping in indignation because they’d left it behind.
‘See what I mean?’ he said. ‘Are you a visitor or something?’ He had bright blue eyes that glittered out of a taut, sun-reddened face.
‘I’m just here to record the song of an old lady,’ I began, but he interrupted me.
‘I’m doing my best to help too,’ he said. He was getting his breath back. ‘But you can’t help those who don’t help themselves. It’s taken me months to get the work this far.’
He waved his hand behind us. I turned to see three partly built besser block houses.
‘Everyone blames me. The government blames me. The families here blame me. “When are we going to move in?” they ask. But the problem is that the government makes me use apprentices from here.’
Terror was still making me pant, but I was relieved to have someone to talk to.
‘Apprentices!’ I said. ‘I suppose you’d have to teach them how to build.’
This seemed to make him angry.
‘Building’s beside the point!’ he cried. ‘I have to teach them how to count; I have to teach them numbers up to ten before they can use a tape measure! What city builder has to do that? I have to teach them English words for –’ he cast around for examples, ‘hammer, ladder, tape measure – everything. On top of that, they have no work ethic so I have to teach them to turn up.’
His blue eyes settled on me, suddenly squinting with fear.
‘Are you from the government?’ he asked. ‘A bureaucrat?’
‘I’m here to record –’ I began.
‘I’m not saying they’re stupid,’ he said quickly. ‘I’d never say that, I tell everyone that they’re clever but in their own way. Their kinship system, of course, you’d have to be Einstein to understand it. And that corrugated iron I saw you inspecting – they don’t rip down houses out of spite – when someone’s died, they think that the dead’s angry spirits will haunt them. Though they’re going to have a hard time pulling down my houses! What I’m trying to say is – don’t put me down as racist.’
Because he seemed to know a lot, I asked him: ‘Do you know an old woman who’s dying? It’s her I’ve come to record.’
But he was backing away from me.
‘Got to get on with the job,’ he said. ‘By the way, have you reported to the elder?’
‘I was invited here,’ I said. ‘I don’t need to – do I?’
‘You haven’t? You’d better go and introduce yourself,’ he said. ‘He says who can stay and who can’t.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ I said.
‘Just round the corner. The purple house.’
Purple. A regal colour. It was right that the elder should have a purple house.
‘I’ll go right now,’ I said.
‘You’d better.’
I began walking up the street again and then there was a honking behind me. It was Adrian, again in a pale blue linen shirt. I kept walking. He pulled alongside.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he demanded.
‘To do my job,’ I said. I kept walking.
‘I asked where you think you’re going.’
‘Have you told the elder that I’m here?’ I asked.
‘They’re not interested in white business,’ he said. ‘Imagine trying to explain your important mission!’
I ignored that barb.
‘The builder said it’s necessary. Don’t worry. I’ll go and introduce myself.’
‘You can’t just barge into an elder’s house! Things are more delicate, especially now with my sacking.’
But he could see I was determined to stride off.
‘It’s not a good time for me to take you,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of discussion going on.’
‘I don’t need taking,’ I said.
He hesitated. I started walking again, so he had to drive beside me.
He must’ve suddenly decided that I could be politically useful to him. Because of his energy, everything about him seemed spontaneous, impulsive, but also, underneath it all, calculating. He must use people for his own ends, I thought, he must use Daniel, perhaps, he must use me. I knew that he thought like that, I knew it in my bones – but how did I know? How could I be so certain? Then I remembered my mother used me to spy. My father used me to show Diana he was a family man, not just a – my heart crunched – her lover. Admit it. Her lover. But Diana – Diana loved me. Adored me. I was the daughter she really wanted, when all she had was a son. She was the one who didn’t use any of us, didn’t use me.
‘Hop in. Now,’ ordered Adrian.
I slowed down. I reasoned that it would probably be easier to be introduced than going to the purple house alone and explaining myself, explaining about the song, and – worst of all – explaining about the travel affix. So I got in. He drove off in the usual cloud of dust, but in the opposite direction.
‘The builder said that street,’ I said, pointing.
‘I’m taking you somewhere to explain.’
‘Explain what?’ My heart lurched.
But all he said was: ‘You’ve got to behave. You’re making a mess of things. You
’re being uncouth.’
‘Uncouth?’
‘Stop talking. Just listen.’
So I listened. Skeleton, he explained, had been a stockman in his youth.
‘So he had some English and he was used to white ways, more or less. But he’s eighty and very traditional. When I first came, if he wanted to speak to me, he’d linger at my gate until I invited him inside. He expects that old-fashioned sort of behaviour.’
He interrupted himself.
‘What’s that for?’ he asked of the recorder I was holding.
‘My job.’
‘They’ll think it’s surveillance.’
‘I’ll ask Skeleton’s permission, of course. I’d like to record the sounds of what he says. If he’s traditional, he might use traditional ways of saying things that could be useful for me.’
‘You’ll record no one till I give you the go-ahead! The mob hates being studied.’
‘How do you know?’ I demanded.
‘I’ve been here twenty years, remember.’ He pulled up.
‘Where are we?’
It was as if we were in an above-ground car park in a shopping mall. At least a thousand empty cars waited, more or less in rows, for their drivers.
‘No one comes here.’
As I gazed I realised that no one would come here because all the cars were rusted away, mere shells of chassis, with smashed windscreens, doors flung open, engines dragged out. Wheels and vinyl seats lay on the red dust, along with a litter of abandoned car doors.
‘Why don’t they get repaired?’
‘Like you realised about the dishwashers.’ He began to giggle, and then stopped. ‘What mechanic’s going to come out here? And who could afford the bills?’
I smelled smoke: a pile of rubbish was on fire in a vast pit to the side of us. On top of it was a cardboard carton, licked with flames, and sticking out of it was the corpse of a dog, its ears upright, the jaw flung back in a terrible grimace.
I cried out and lunged out of the troopie. Adrian grabbed me.
‘You’re so sentimental,’ he said. ‘Families can’t afford these dogs. They’re better off in the fire than starving to death.’
